Welcome to the March 2013 issue of ScieCom info. Nordic - Baltic Forum for Scientific Communication.

We are pleased to present the exciting developments from the DOAJ team. From the DOAJ news release: milestones: “We have just completed the transition to a new environment and launched a new platform with integrated functionality
for sharing, exporting and enhanced search/browse functionality: at the article level, search results can be filtered by language and publication year and by license and publication fee; at the journal level, you can filter by subject, by country, by license
and by publication fees./- - - / For the first time more than 50% of the journals are providing metadata at article level./---/More than 1 million articles are now searchable in DOAJ“

Jan Erik Frantsvåg analyses the consequences of large research funders’s use of their financial power to put pressure behind their
demands for OA. Non-compliance with the contracts between funders and grantees will expos institutions and researchers to risks of economic and career losses. In “Researcher, beware“ these risks are discussed. Institutions with externally funded research
must teach their researchers how to handle funding contracts and what compliance implies. The jungle of different policies exposes researchers to risks and frustration. This can be avoided if everyone aligns their policies with those of the EU or NIH. Frantsvåg
also comments on the CC-By licence, required by, for instance, the RCUK.

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In Iceland two important changes regarding OA took place in January 2013.
Sólveig Thorsteinsdottir describes them in “Icelandic funder mandate and revised law for publicly supported research in Iceland“.

The parliament has approved a bill amending the law on public support for scientific research. A new article on OA was added: “The results of research funded by grants from the funds that come under this Act shall be
published in open access and made accessible to everyone, unless otherwise agreed. Beneficiaries shall in all their research papers resulting from the funds, state the name of the grantor.“ The other important event is the OA mandate from the largest public
funder Rannís - the Icelandic Centre for Research

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Leif Longva: “Tendering the purchase of Open Access publishing” notes that the benefits of OA now have been widely acknowledged and receive high-level support. Prominent examples are the Research Councils UK (RCUK), and
the coming EU framework program Horizon 2020. Longva takes a market-oriented view of the many institutional funds established to help authors pay their article processing fees (APCs). The current funding system lacks real incentives for authors to shop around
for the most reasonable APCs, and journals are free to set any prices they want.

To create a real market, tendering should be used to purchase OA. This will ensure that authors get the most value for money. Longva describes
how

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Three authors from Lithuania,
Gintare Tautkeviciene, Vilma Petrikaite, and Marija Eidukeviciute present the project “Open Access from the Perspectives of Young Researchers”. It was implemented in 2012 by Kaunas University of Technology together with the Lithuanian Society of Young Researchers
and the partners Lithuanian Research Libraries Consortium and the Association of Lithuanian Serials. Three seminars on OA were organized, introducing doctoral students, young scientists and other researchers to international and regional OA initiatives, possibilities
of increased global visibility, the OA requirements of the European Commission, the European Research Council, and other funding bodies, copyright issues, and the concept of open science. A series of workshops was arranged, concluding with a public discussion
on open access developments in Lithuania.

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In the Swedish report “It takes two to tango – making way for relevant research support services at Lund University Libraries (LUB)”
Hanna Voog & Gunilla Wiklund present a 2012 project to investigate what types of support researchers in Lund need and in what areas. Were the existing library services adequate, should they be strengthened or should entirely new services be developed?
The project included a literature review on definitions, examples of support services and researcher needs, and experiences of support services. A survey was carried out to identify support services at LUB, and focus group interviews were arranged with researchers
from participating faculty. One important conclusion was that research support services need to be easily accessible, visible, and close to the researchers.

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Finally we turn to the specific subject of OA monographs, here discussed by
Jörgen Eriksson and Aina Svensson in ”Monographs and Open Access”. The developments of OA publishing has mainly focused on scientific journal articles. However, an increasing number of initiatives concentrating on the academic monograph have been introduced.
The business models for printed monographs in Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences tend to be regarded as unsustainable. Publishers, universities and others look for new ways to handle monographs. The authors present a Swedish project focusing on two areas:
to make monographs freely available, and to propose a national model for academic review of monographs. A summary of the session on monographs and OA at the “4th Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing (COASP) 19-21 September 2012” is also presented.